232 Scarcity and SurfeitNetworking and coordination are nevertheless critical to avoid creating ten-
sions between different areas in the course of providing relief and aid.
The need to establish the internal capacity and an institutional framework
enabling the inhabitants of the region to benefit from the country's consider-
able resources is central to the conclusions presented here. There is little to
indicate relief has developed local capacity, both in basic areas like transport
and grass-roots NGO food distribution. Capital formation, in a land where the
NBA's Manute Bol was once reportedly the wealthiest individual, is obvious-
ly weak. In regard to developing administrative and private sector capacity,
the southern leadership has missed the boat. The 1990s were the SPLM's lost
decade, during which they squandered most of their political capital at home
and abroad.
Though peace work obviously cannot contend with all the causes con-
tributing to Sudan's conflict cycle, identifying its systemic attributes, including
the ecological variables explored here, generates practical criteria for advoca-
cy and developmental programmes matched to local conditions, including the
material deprivation resulting from decades of instability and warfare. One les-
son underscored by the critical influence of even small ecological variations
across an environment argue for the participatory, bottom-up approach to
assistance that is fast becoming the new developmental orthodoxy.
Two phases of armed liberation struggle claiming between an estimated
one million and 1.5 millionlives up to this point make the fact that the south
is ensnared in a cycle of violence whose individual and aggregate effects will
continue to perpetuate itself beyond the achievement of any political settle-
ment. Mitigations for the current situation, however, are not amenable to
macro formulae. For example: the south, as described by one Nairobi-based
programme director, "has no roads, no schools, no hospitals and little else in
the way of services; the best course of action depends on where one stands
in the variegated landscape and the particular lenses through which any
given individual views the conflict."105
Internal antagonisms among communities in the south represent an
embedded source of violence operating largely independent of the issues
underpinning north-south opposition. Many such ethnic divisions are trace-
able to, or co-terminons with, group adaptations to ecological niches. Many
of the conflicts crystallising along these fault lines involve competition over
scarce resources. This is one source of communal violence; another is the
prospect for capture of environmental resources and control of surpluses by
ethnic 'distributive agents'. The latent political ramifications of a new ethnic
regime replacing the old racial-religious regime, either in the event of settle-
ment leading to a reunited state or to the proposed state of the 'New Sudan'
rank high in the minds of southerners in Equatoria and elsewhere.
The Dinka are by far the largest ethnic population in not just the south,
but in all of Sudan. Most commentators familiar with the subject reaffirm the